Have Your Soup and Eat your Red-Oil Wontons Too
If you haven't noticed yet from my recipes, Beijingers like to make foods with a filling and some kind of flour/dough exterior. Wontons are one of the easiest of this category--with the prevalence of store-bought wrappers these days. Whenever I make wontons, I make them two ways. The first is what I grew up with--the northern style of wonton soup | 混沌汤. The second I make for White Boyfriend, as he prefers the southern, Cantonese "red-oil wonton" | 红油抄手. The good news is making wontons two ways is incredibly easy and a great way to get two dishes out of one.
Step 1 is making the filling. This is actually exactly the same as making meatballs for winter melon soup. The difference is I beat the egg first and reserve 1/3 of it. This will be used later as a glue to seal the wontons. Speaking of glue I'm reminded of 奶奶 (grandmother) making glue when I was little out of a cooked flour and water mixture. She used to let me taste it when she was done and I got a kick out of the idea of eating glue.
In this case, you probably don't want to taste your raw egg glue. Once you've combined the filling ingredients, make sure you stir them together rapidly with chopsticks until the consistency is sticky. Check the salt level by tasting the raw pork and then spitting it out. It should taste almost a tad too salty as it'll mellow out once the wontons are boiled.
Now you're ready to make wontons. It's important to get a little assembly line together of wrappers, filling, egg glue, and wonton tray--in that order. A picture speaks a thousand words in terms of the process. There are many ways to wrap wontons. This is the easiest way I know. Line up your wonton army and prepare for war! ...or dinner. Whatever.
Next, put a pot of water on the stove and while you're waiting for that to boil, put together the sauce for the red-oil wontons. The ratio of ingredients in the sauce can be adjusted at your discretion, depending on if you want it a little sweeter, sour, spicy, or mouth-numbing. Drop the wontons in boiling water and continue to boil until they all bob expectantly to the top.
All that's left to do is plate the two versions. For soup, ladle the wontons with the water into a bowl, mixing in a little soy sauce, vinegar, sesame oil, and topping with green onions and cilantro. For the Sichuan variety, drain the wontons from the water and mix with the sauce you've made, topping again with green onions and cilantro. Get White Boyfriend a placemat, because those wontons are gonna slip around like you're trying to pick up goldfish with your bare hands. He's sure to dribble and splatter chili oil all over the place. He'll also complain about the large amount of dishes you've left for him in the sink, but hey, he's the one who had to have wontons the second way.
For the straight-up wontons recipe, click here.